In 1988, the American Neptune published an article by Dwight E. Robinson on the British coastal fleet in the eighteenth century.2 It was a pioneering study in that before then very few pieces had been published on any aspect of the British coastal trade in this or any other maritime history journal. It reminded readers of the great importance of the British coastal trade, both quantitatively and qualitatively, from the earliest days of Britain and especially of its role as a nursery for seamen and in boosting Britain's naval power through training seamen in ship handling and navigation. It was also innovative in its methodology, as Robinson had to deal with the problem of double recording of ships and find a method to eliminate such double counting. He chose to use a computer database for this task, a relatively novel solution at the time. Furthermore, the article provided a quantitative assessment of the size of the British coastal trade in 1776, and was able to break this down by the nature of the cargo carried, between domestic coasting and that to near-continental ports, and also provided a ranking of which ports were the largest owners of coasters and therefore probably the most heavily engaged in operating coastal ships. This was important work and came up with revealing findings.

Robinson took maritime historians to task for ignoring “a comprehensive source of data” that would allow us to estimate “the extent and nature of the British domestic coasting fleet” in the eighteenth century.3 Given that the article was published over a decade ago, and that no subsequent book or article has appeared tackling the question of the size of the British eighteenth-century coasting fleet or drawing on the documentation to which Robinson referred, maritime historians appear to be either incorrigibly slow and lazy or totally disinterested in the British coasting fleet. Our object is to redeem the community of maritime historians. There are good reasons why the records in question have not been extensively used, and why Robinson overstated their comprehensiveness and value.

The records that Robinson used were the British Admiralty's thirtyeight “Registers of Protection from Being Pressed,” held in the National Archives in Kew on the western outskirts of London.